Unspoken
by starkblast
Summary: Just a bunch of little vignettes, semi-poetic and emotional.
1. Chapter 1

Stark red drops hit the table between them, hollow little splatters resounding in the sudden silence.

He turns slowly, keeping his eyes downcast as he pretends not to have seen.

He can't let her see his eyes, not just because of the pity she doesn't want to see, but because of his sickening, all-consuming fear.

If she see his eyes, she'll know his terror, recognize the hopeless begging of miracles from a god he's never believed in, and it will only break her more, little by little.

He knows the only thing that keeps her going is the belief that she can continue to function unhindered until things get Real Bad, keeping her stoic mask cinched tightly over her sunken, weary face. If he can do nothing else, he'll let her keep her show of strength, despite his own terrible need to brush shaking fingers over her bloodied upper lip, to crush her to his chest, to let her know that, god damn it, he is here.

But she knows. She draws silently on his strength, and he bites his tongue, letting the copper taste of blood spread bitterly across it before daring to question if she's okay.

She'd say the same thing, anyway, if he asked. The same tired lie that they both know well. And as much as it hurts not to speak, it would hurt him more to hear her say I'm Fine.

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AUTHOR'S NOTE: I want to make a whole series of these semi-poetic little vignettes, but I have a tendency to get hung up on things. (For example, if left to my own devices, they will all probably follow this one and I'll end up with a thousand depressing snapshots of Cancer Scully)

If anybody liked this and wants more, send me prompts!

If not, I'll just channel my sadness into one of my other stories.


	2. Chapter 2

(I did the thing, just like I said I would. Oops. I think I just need to get cancer Scully out of the brain for a bit because she's blocking my other stories. Sorry, not sorry.)

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They're going to need to run some more tests, the doctor rambles, once she's feeling up to it. But not out of much of a sense of hope; he's certain that this is just the next anticipated step in the progression of the disease.

The ease with which he speaks mortifies and sickens me. Though I don't have a medical degree, I know enough. Every word he drops calmly on me is piercing, each a fresh nail in her coffin.

But the one - the most insidious of words in the endless etymology of this wretched illness, which I have dreaded to hear for months - this at least, he has the courtesy of speaking in the hushed tone it commands in its horribleness.

 _Metastases._

The affirmation that no amount of hoping or praying or raging against the injustice of it all could keep the malignant clusters of cells from spreading. Soon, they'll take new pieces of her from me, little by little until there is nothing left.

His face as he spells it out tells me with agonizing certainty that our time is already nearly up. Had I not been on my way over when she collapsed, had I not let myself in at her lack of response to my knock, had I not found her on her knees, choking blood onto the white carpet as it seeped across her front and down the back of her throat, today would have been it. The end of her, the end of me.

My brain is buzzing with the dull, heady drone of not-yet-realized panic as he leans in, rendering me speechless with a simple ill-worded question.

She'd be awake soon, he said, and the new development in her condition needed to be discussed.

"Agent Mulder? What do you want to tell her?"

I stare back in stunned disbelief.

What do I want to _tell her?_

Fuck him. Fuck all of it.

I want to tell her what anyone in my position would, but so much more, because my position is unrelatable and because, more than any other human on this entirely damned planet dying of cancer, _she does not deserve this_.

I want to tell her that everything is fine, and by the way how do you feel about Thai food tonight?

I want to tell her that she's going to live, damn it, that her days and years are not that numbered, not yet.

He sees my rage, my grief, my obvious volatility, all spelled plainly on my features because I simply do not have the resolve to hide them and because I have to save my Okay face for her, because I cannot bear to add the weight of my own pain to the burden she already carries.

He sees how close I am to snapping or crumbling though I am not sure which, but stays silent. He's had this conversation hundreds of times.

Finally a brittle sigh escapes my frozen lungs and I allow my shoulders to slump in a moment of weakness that only the doctor bears witness to. What am I going to tell her?

"The truth."


	3. Chapter 3

Second half to that last bit. Continued first-person Mulder. Much angst. But I think I got cancer Scully out.

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I've always marvelled at how she wound up in my life, and at what obscure insanity compelled her, time and again, to stay by my side, a pillar of stability even as the world seemed to crumble around us. _All my doing,_ I remind myself. _She's here because of you. **Dying** because of you._

I know I don't deserve her, but that doesn't stop me from cursing the final, grand irony of what her allegiance has cost her. The taste in my mouth is bitter as I think that maybe all along she was my punishment. That such a sorry, deranged narcissist such as myself could experience something akin to happiness, to belonging, for just long enough to utterly destroy me when they snatch her back, send her away, or worst of all; leave her here for me to bury.

My eyes are downcast as I step gingerly into the sterile little room, holding my spine straight and shoulders upright in a wholly unconvincing facade of stability, a worthless gamble that she might not see how wretchedly broken I am, might not see the fierceness and fight that she has come to depend on in these weakening months drain out of me as I am finally forced to face the reality that I did this to her just as much as They did. I started writing her death sentence the day we met, word by word, and now it is mine alone to present, to set neatly and unflinchingly in front of her to sign.

I am at the bedside before I drag my eyes up from the floor, but for the moment at least, it seems that I can set aside my hooded robe and jagged scythe.

God, I am such a fucking coward.

She's sleeping. Her face pale and smooth, blessedly free of the pain I've come to take as a constant, despite the thinness of her cheeks, the dark hollows around her eyes. The medication will keep her under for a while longer, letting me sit with her on borrowed time, not yet having to tell her that Sorry darling, you're officially out of the race.

Panic suddenly grips me as I think of the consequences of my cowardice. What if she doesn't regain consciousness? What if this is it, and she goes out in a steady blare of alarms as the monitors clock her failing heart, her falling blood pressure, cessation of brain activity, before I can say anything at all?

 _Would you really give up the chance to see her eyes open again if it meant you wouldn't have to face her one more time, to admit your guilt?_

The self-destructive questions tear painful new holes in my torso and I can't help but think that I'd deserve it all.

But if I'm lucky enough to have that conversation, she won't put up with it. She doesn't hold me accountable for my faults, and champions me vehemently against myself when I try to wallow in self-loathing.

I've mentioned that I don't deserve her. Not one bit.

Sinking into the stiff bedside chair, surely designed to keep psychos like myself from sleeping in a patient's room for days on end, I let her gravity pull me in as it always has, taking a slim, cold hand between both of my own and hunching forward, pressing my forehead to her chilly knuckles.

Spineless as I am, I shut my eyes, picturing her as she had been months ago, and start to whisper all the sacred confessions that I may have one day found the strength to share, had we been lucky enough to make it that far. Since that first paralyzing time we danced around the word _terminal_ , they had hung in the air between us, unspoken because I was too in denial to speak them. More recently, I bit my tongue because I simply could not bear to inflict more pain than I already had, even if it meant she might have peace.

Coward.

Now, though, she sleeps, and I can start to prepare myself by letting my broken lips form around all the things I wish she knew, tucking them around her in the warm bed, pretending that they can fill the holes that riddle her, that they will make any kind of difference when she's six feet under the earth and I am reeling, a lifeless rock of a planet whose sun has blinked from existence, taking light and direction and reason along with it.

The woman that I etch with sharp claws of desperation into the walls of my memory is only slightly younger, only marginally more whole. Her gently curving frame holds a healthy ten or fifteen more pounds than it does now, rigid and bony on the bed before me. Her skin is warm and real, but I can see the hardness that she has built over the years, an invisible diamond sheath to strengthen her against friend and foe alike, to hold the unknowable creature beneath together should her more human constructs fail. Her smile is brief, reaching her glacial melt eyes but belying the unmistakably haunted nature of her brilliant, beautiful mind.

I wish with a fierce and aching futility that I could preserve her as she had been when we met; a softly commanding and magnetic presence, an ever-surprising force whose laughter was as invigorating as her anger was terrifying. Trusting. Sarcastic. Infuriating. And good. Damn it she was good, to her core. She is many of these things still, but my partner is less and more now in ways that have marked us both. _My_ Scully. Her smile might be ghostly in my mind, but at least it is a smile.

I begin to hate myself just a little bit less as I let my confessions sear up my throat, push past my lips and melt into her palm, warming the cold and delicate hand I clutch. My words seem innumerable and as the minutes of my monologue lengthen I realize just how toxic they were in my chest, how badly I needed to give voice to them.

"I'll never be ready to let you go," I whisper against her wrist. "Not now, not tomorrow...not in fifty years if by some miracle either of us lived to be that old. There's just no accepting it."

I take a deep breath, careful not to stir the bed with my movement.

"I don't know how to justify any of it, Scully." If my voice were higher than a whisper it would break. "I think that part of me would be sucking a bullet out of my gun by the end of the week. A _big_ part. But the tiny part that isn't entirely selfish would try to keep this up. To find someone - anyone responsible and make them pay for what they've done to you. Done to both of us. I just….don't think I'm strong enough to do that alone."

That train of thought is too painful, so I try for something lighter.

"You didn't fix me, you know. Not that you tried, surprisingly. Refreshingly. God knows women have tried." I think back to my shock the first time she stood by my outlandish ideas in front of agents who respected her, uplifting me even as I mocked myself, a long-learned lesson of self-preservation. "But you made me feel like there was still a part of me that wasn't broken yet, and then you took that part and you strengthened it."

"I'm not giving up yet," I whisper fiercely, driven by the need to keep her breathing just as she has always done for me. "I can't. I won't."

Her fingers twitch, tightening around mine, more than just a reflex. A warm weight settles behind my head and lightly, tenderly, her hand smoothes over my hair.

"Mulder," she murmurs, and though her voice is thin and syrupy from sleep, I can tell that she has heard enough. The hand I hold tightens slightly, comforting me even though she's the one who's dying. Her grip gives with it her own confessions, her own silent promises, and when she speaks again I know without looking that the little haunted smile is playing on her lips.

"I know."

It isn't a cure. It isn't justice. But right now, for me, it is enough.


End file.
